


After the War

by Carmarthen



Category: Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Grief, Jedi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Recovery, Siblings, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-19
Updated: 2012-05-19
Packaged: 2017-11-05 15:43:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/408158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/pseuds/Carmarthen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia told Luke later, after the Death Star, that she understood why Obi-Wan and Yoda had chosen him to train. </p><p>Leia dealing with grief and anger and her own connection with the Force, finding a place for herself after the war. As usual, not Expanded-Universe-compliant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the War

Leia had found little opportunity for dresses since the Imperial Senate was disbanded and she became a fugitive, an open Rebel with a price on her head. She never knew when she’d have to wriggle through a ventilation shaft or climb over a wall or run for her life, and it was easier to do most of those things in trousers.

It was...nice, that the Ewoks had made her this dress, so she didn’t have to wear her fatigues all the time. The forest moon was nice. It was all nice--Wicket’s cheerful patience with their mimed conversations; the wary welcome of the other Ewoks; the lush, quiet green of the forest.

It was very quiet in the forest.

For long moments, Leia could almost forget that there was a war out there, a war over the fate of the galaxy, with billions of lives in the balance. And then she would hear the distant creak and crash of the ancient giants of the forest toppling, cut down by Imperial war machines. Or a party of Ewok hunters would come back with only a skinny animal or two, not enough, and she would remember why the only sounds in the forest were the rustle of ferns in the occasional breeze.

She was so tired of the fight, though, and it was not as if she could do anything but wait for someone to come into com range. Striking out into the forest alone, she’d be as likely to die of dehydration or stumble on an Imperial patrol as encounter any Rebels. Luke would find her, if she waited. She did not-- _could_ not--understand these new abilities of his, not really, but she believed in them, and in him. He’d find her, like he found Han, and then they would return to the business of taking down the Empire.

Until then, she would enjoy this illusion of peace, enjoy breathing fresh cool air that hadn’t been through a ship’s ‘cyclers a million times, enjoy the dappled sun and the glimpses of blue sky, enjoy the green that reminded her of things--places, people--she had no time to think about until the war was over.

* * *

_You have a power I don't understand and could never have._

Leia knew the moment she said it that it was a lie. She had found out in a single moment that she too had the seeds of a frankly terrifying power in her, and that her blood-father was a creature whose leashed rage and cold violence had frightened her from the moment she first met him as a child wanting nothing more than to hide behind her foster-mother’s skirts.

But she had been a Princess of Alderaan, so she had stood with her back straight in her heavy formal robes and tried desperately not to flinch under the weight of Lord Vader’s regard. And then the moment had passed--what interest had Vader in a child?--and she had been dismissed to return to her rooms. She spent the rest of the afternoon curled up in the bottom of a cupboard, refusing to come out no matter what treats her nurses promised her.

And looking at Luke’s earnest, gentle face, she thought about the anger in her own heart, all the rage she had learned over a lifetime of seeing Imperial injustices that she was powerless to fix.

She could not have that power, could not risk becoming that monster.

* * *

As Leia grew older, she found herself spending more and more time at the shooting range after Lord Vader’s visits. She did not wish to kill him or anything like that, although she disliked him intensely. He was, in his peculiar way, a creature of honor, horrifying for all that but not as horrifying as the endless parade of petty bureaucrats and military governors who did the day-to-day dirty work of the Empire. She would rather deal with Vader than Moff Tarkin and his ilk.

But every time he visited she felt hot and itchy the entire time. Her skin prickled and her thoughts felt slow, her hearing muffled, as if she were submerged at the bottom of a swimming pool, holding her breath. It was torturous, behaving properly as a Princess of Alderaan, and trying to seem normal when she felt stupid and miserable.

Scorching a target into oblivion made her feel better afterwards, and if that wasn’t quite the pacifism a Princess of Alderaan should show, well, it might be the difference between life and death someday, and Leia could never quite bring herself to care. She knew what her father was involved in, although she didn’t think he knew she knew, and she would not let him take that risk alone forever.

“You’ve become quite good,” her father said as she clipped a fresh power pack to her sporting blaster. Leia had heard him coming--she must have, anyway, because she wasn’t at all startled when he spoke--so she didn’t turn.

She squinted at her target. The center was a smoking hole with glowing edges, the wall behind it carbon-scored and blackened. A few stray shots, but all in all, not bad. “I practice a lot.”

“As long as you remember to eat and sleep, my dear,” Bail said, resting a hand on her shoulder for a moment. “I just stopped by to tell you that lunch will be ready soon.”

Later she pulled up her stats from the shooting range’s monitoring comp. They _were_ pretty good, and on a whim she asked for the stats of the top five competitive sport shooters on Alderaan.

She blinked at the screen. Her accuracy was fifteen percent above the top-ranked shooter. _Not_ within standard deviation. 

When she had the computer calculate the odds of her accuracy rate, she relaxed. There had to be some kind of error, because that was just ridiculous. Probably the target calibration was off, scoring her more accurately than it should.

It was the only possible explanation.

_I know. Somehow, I've always known._

* * *

After Endor, after the chaos of the Empire’s dissolution had mostly settled and efforts had turned to rebuilding a Republic, Leia started seeing a therapist.

She was unsure whether there was a standard therapeutic technique for handling people whose entire worlds had been literally blown up because of them. ( _It wasn’t because of you,_ her therapist said when she put it this way during the second session. _People who will destroy a planet don’t need an excuse._ Leia was still working on believing that.) Han didn’t think much of therapy in general, but he wisely kept his mouth shut about it and held her when she asked him to, and distracted her when she asked for that.

But she liked her therapist, a blue-skinned Twi’lek woman with a brisk manner who reminded her a little of Mon Mothma. And as horrible as therapy was, somehow having that controlled, safe space where she could let herself shatter once a week, let herself mourn and scream and rage, meant that the rest of the time she didn’t feel quite so brittle, quite so close to the edge of breaking down.

Leia was starting to believe that she would be able to put the pieces back together eventually. Maybe she would even be stronger, like a bone that had been broken and then healed. She had to believe in that possibility.

* * *

She told Luke that she understood why Obi-Wan and Yoda had chosen him to train.

He looked at her in open surprise, and said very gently, “Leia, that’s not it. They--they had given up on Anakin Skywalker long ago. They wanted me to kill him. They told me that if I tried to save Han from Jabba, everything would be lost. I--didn’t listen to them, about a lot of things, but I believe I made the right choice.”

He had told her about what happened on the Death Star. Leia couldn’t imagine herself doing what he had done--throwing away his weapon, refusing to fight. Choosing faith in a man who had given the entire galaxy every reason to have none for the past twenty years. Being ready to die for that faith rather than risk being consumed by evil.

She was not Luke.

“They chose me because you already had your work--the Alliance. You were needed elsewhere. I was just an orphaned farmboy.”

“But I _am_ angry,” Leia said quietly, clenching her fists in her lap until her knuckles turned white.

“I know. But I’ve seen what you do with your anger.” Luke reached over and took one of her hands, carefully uncurling her fingers. “You help people. Your courage is fueled with anger, and with those you give people hope. You use your anger to make the galaxy a better place. Learning to use the Force wouldn’t change who you _are._ ” He ran his free hand through his hair and ducked his head, sheepish, for a moment again the boy he had been when they first met and not the confident Jedi Knight he was now. “I’m not--I’m only barely a Jedi, but if you want--I could try to teach you.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“All right.” Luke scooted over to sit next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him, looking out over the never-sleeping lights of Coruscant, and felt her shoulders start to relax a little.

And sitting there with the man she had fought beside for the last four years and the brother she barely knew, Leia thought that it was good to have family, and to have answers, even if not all of them were answers she liked. 

It was good to have a future, after the war.

 _“Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage.  
Anger that things are the way they are.  
Courage to make them the way they ought to be.”  
-St. Augustine_

**Author's Note:**

> I...am not really down with movie philosophy that certain emotions are negative and lead only to evil, and others are positive. So this is, perhaps, not a canonical view of the Jedi, but in a significant way Luke isn't a proper Jedi either. And he ignores the instructions of his Jedi teachers twice, crucially, and turns out to be right both times.
> 
> Also I've thought for a long time that Leia probably has some serious Alderaan-related psychological issues going on, so this is my small and tangential contribution to the subgenre of Leia Deals With Alderaan stories.


End file.
